Syndication

Focus on the group, the community, the village, and on activities such as compromise, collaboration, cooperation—as well as on other groupiness goals and teaminess theories—can foster fruitless, dysfunctional, even harmful, results. If a group effort is to be capable or a team to be effective, each person participating needs to have a well-developed self. Unfortunately, all people are not well-developed selves.

Has our culture gotten out of balance towards the group and away from autonomy? Both are needed for healthy action, and vigorous living, but group and team seem to be more highly valued and spotlighted today.

Baumeister looked at how we define "self." Is it a process, a performance, a story? And he talked about why the idea of self is out of favor in some disciplines such as cognitive psychology and neuroscience while essential to others such as economics and social psychology.

He asked: How does the self emerge? He referred to "More Is Different" by P.W. Anderson and explained that "self" is the opposite of reductionism. At the higher and more complex levels of structure is where the self emerges, not at the levels of basic parts and ingredients. Because the self is complex, the reductionist point of view will not see it and likely will deny the possibility of its existence. Anderson says

At each stage, entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.

Baumeister talked about the need for each member of a group to be fully developed and to have a differentiated self. If that kind of self does not make up the group, group pathology will likely result, including

Diffusion of responsibility

Groupthink

Brainstorming that is less productive than work done individually by group members

Conformity

Social loafing (group members putting forth less effort)

Poor decision-making

Resources wasted

Stereotyping

Individuals submerged to the group (when individuals blend and are submerged, the group is less than its total number)

These days I am seeing that unfortunately many advocates of groups and teams do not
typically look at what kind of selves are needed to make up functional and productive efforts of collaboration. The team approach is
revered but with little thought to the necessary quality of team members. It is almost as if the team cheerleaders think all people are

Here's a fun way to categorize yourself and others, at least for a short while. Although this typology has no scientific validity, like many of the other self-report assessments such as Myers-Briggs, it is a good reminder that we are not all the same, and that OSFA (one size fits all) is an ineffective and sometimes risky assumption. (Click to read about some of the problems with personality assessments.)

In my research of educational game design, I came upon the typology; it's Bartle's Taxonomy of Player Types. The four types are achiever, explorer, socializer, and killer. They were developed to describe the different ways people approach games and can be compared to the four suits in a card deck:

An easy way to remember these is to consider suits in a conventional pack of cards: achievers are Diamonds (they're always seeking treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socialisers are Hearts (they empathise with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with them).

Another way to see these four:

Killers and achievers act. Killers act on other players and achievers act on the world.

Socializers and explorers interact. Socializers interact with other players and explorers interact with the world.

In order to find out what type you are (or, more exactly, what type you are today because these kinds of assessments are situational), take this quick test. It's fun, and, if you are like me, some of the questions

People reading the paper or checking their phones during a workshop. The crossed arms or sea of silence during a staff meeting. A small group that always seems to gather during breaks in a strategic planning session.

During any facilitation effort, you are going to see all kinds of individual and group behavior, often feeling the need to do something about what you are seeing. The critical question is simple: should you?

In his great facilitation primer, The Skilled Facilitator, Roger Schwarz offers us five critical questions we can answer to guide us in determining whether or not we should intervene. I offer them below verbatim coupled with my own commentary on them.

The classic article "Neuroscience of Leadership" (strategy+business) is several years old now, but it's still worth reading. Or rereading if you haven't done so recently. I thought of the article last week when I saw someone recommending a management approach based on behaviorism. Specifically, I thought of these words by the article's authors David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz:

Many existing models for changing people’s behavior are drawn from a field called behaviorism. The field emerged in the 1930s and was led by psychologist B.F. Skinner and advertising executive John B. Watson, building on Ivan Pavlov’s famous concept of the condi- tioned response: Associate the ringing of a bell with food, and a dog can be made to salivate at the sound. The behaviorists generalized this observation to people, and established an approach to change that has some- times been caricatured as: “Lay out the M&Ms.” For each person, there is one set of incentives — one combination of candy colors — that makes the best motivator. Present the right incentives, and the desired change will naturally occur. If change doesn’t occur, then the mix of M&M colors must be adjusted.

Yet there is plenty of evidence from both clinical research and workplace observation that change efforts based on typical incentives and threats (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run. For example, when people routinely come late to meetings, a manager may reprimand them. This may

How many panel sessions have you attended that were worth your time? I bet your answer is "not many." Why? This post from Scott Berkun's Speaker Confessions to which I link below addresses most of the major problems. And cites some remedies.

Almost every panel I have attended over the decades that was beneficial to attendees was the result of lots of pre-panel planning and discussion. Of course, this prep time is one of the remedies mentioned in the post.

Most training conferences in most industries resort to what’s called a panel session. This is where 3 to 5 experts get up on stage and each one, in turn, bores the audience to death.

Why do panels still happen? One reason. They’re sooooo tempting.

In theory a panel is jam packed with goodness, as it gets more people on stage at the same time, creates something real and spontaneous, and all things being equal more interesting stuff should happen than your average lecture.

Stan Van Gundy’s relentless pursuit of self-improvement led him this past offseason to engage in conversation and undergo skull sessions with noted psychologists in Florida and California. And the person who emerged is a somewhat kinder, gentler and more patient coach of the Orlando Magic.

Well, at least until the games begin.

...

Maybe it’s a Christmas miracle of sorts.

...

Van Gundy ... sought the opinion of Anders Eriksson, a Florida State professor who studies behavior patterns of elite performers in several fields. And he also dined and philosophized with Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck, author of the book ``Mindset.’’

Van Gundy asked what qualified as too much criticism, and Dweck said the amount of criticism didn’t matter nearly as much as the subject matters that the coach chose to be critical about at times. ...

I believe that Dweck could develop a couple of new consulting niches: Attorneys with mentoring responsibilities, as well as instructors in law school clinics. Maybe even a law prof or two teaching first-year classes, too. Maybe not . . .

"Educating the Whole Student" will be held February 16 through 18, in San Francisco. The exciting lineup of speakers includes: Dan Siegel, Susan Kaiser Greenland, Michael Posner, Brock and Fernette Eide, Patricia Churchland, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, and Jaak Panksepp.

For a small group of friends and colleagues, I am organizing a two-day retreat in the Bay Area to occur after this conference at which we can look at the neuroscience of adult learning and communication in great depth. The emphasis will be on conflict resolution, coaching, and client relations. We will learn from each other and have fun, too. I'm looking for a place in Marin or Sonoma or even Mendocino County that will promote both the learning and the fun. Suggestions? Please e-mail me if you are interested in attending this post-conference confab.

As a method to establish rapport, many communication "experts" (including sales coaches and Neurolinguistic Programming practitioners) teach the technique of mirroring. The practice, as a technique, probably originated with the insightful and talented Virginia Satir.

behaviour in which one person copies another person usually while in social interaction with them. It may include miming gestures, movements, body language, muscle tensions, expressions, tones, eye movements, breathing, tempo, accent, attitude, choice of words/metaphors and other aspects of communication.

Some new research may show us that mirroring when discussing money is a bad idea. The news release from Association for Psychological Science is below but the bottom line:

Simply put – people tend to feel threatened and end up disliking those who are trying to bond with them when reminded about money.

Sounds like the use of mirroring, at least in the context of sales, finances, estate planning, and other money-related activities may need to be re-evaluated.

I have requested a copy of the study so I can read it in its entirety. I may add more below after reading ""Money and Mimicry: When Being Mimicked Makes People Threatened."

Being around jazz on a daily basis, I often think about (and discuss in some of my seminars) the many lessons this genre of music offers for business people and for professionals, such as lawyers. I am not alone in my thinking; the creators of several books, articles, and videos have looked at jazz's lessons for success. Here are a few (to which I will add as I learn of new resources):

The biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed that our minds are not confined inside of our heads, but stretch out beyond them. From this perspective I offer the view that the future of human mental development is not only relational but that it is intersubjective in ways that go beyond what we can now accept as possible. I see the growth of the mind's capacity for intersubjectivity as an ongoing process of "playing with boundaries" whereby an affectively embodied self-and-other are jointly constructing an intersubjective realm in which the coexistence of seemingly incompatible perspectives on reality become